THE SATURDAY ESSAY: Why the undecided Brits should listen to the radical realism of Viktor Orban – and Vote Leave
BY JOHN WARD
“We have learnt that reality is that which does not disappear – even if we no longer believe in it. This is why we always measure everything against reality, and why we do not confuse reality with our desires.” (Viktor Orban)
From time to time in these columns, I do try to remind both myself and Sloggers that while for 95+% of people in the West the crisis we’re going through is econo-fiscal, in reality Crash2 is only a symptom of a broader malaise.
It has now been deemed politically incorrect by the US, UK and EU Establishments to adhere to such a viewpoint, because as you know everything is the same as it always was, only better. At the moment, some UK citizens are kicking out against this pernicious falsehood, but although David Cameron ‘called’ the Referendum we face, he didn’t want it and he has no intention of being a thorn in the EU’s side. At the last count three days ago, 40.1% of Britons want to leave the Union: around 18% are still undecided, but 2 in 5 of our citizens are unhappy with the rampant federalism of Brussels-am-Berlin. Cameron is not one of them…although over 80% of his Party workers are.
Whether we like it or not, by far the most important factor for UK Leavers (and around a third of undecideds) is the question of mass migration. It is expressed politely as “control of our borders” by Nigel Farage, but it is really about whether Britain (by far the most overpopulated of the Top Five EU economies) can cope with yet more demands on housing, social integration and public health services. And at the core, it is little more than the next round in the quiet battle between multicultural enthusiasts, and those who have seen more than enough to help them decide that the EU is a Utopian idea predictably spiralling into incompetent anarchy.
The arrival of genuine refugees via Syria has seen the Greeks at their best in dealing with the mess compassionately, but like almost everything these days the situation there is not sustainable. The second wave of younger agents provocateurs generously sent to us by Mr Erdogan – under the watchful eye of NATO – managed in six weeks flat to turn German garlands into grubby violence, following which the headless bantam in Brussels ran about chucking money at Turkey, and delivered unto us a policy of sharing out the displaced, while giving Turkish citizens virtually uncontrolled access to the EU.
This isn’t crisis management, it is rank bad dictatorial top-down stubborn governance. Not only will it (like the euro) end in tears, it is rapidly unravelling what’s left of the original myth of a borderless Europe. But then, there is no difference whatsoever between this ‘policy’ reaction, and the never-ending stagger from one dictated cockup to another: Trichet’s ludicrous generosity with sovereign loans after 2002, bond spikes in ClubMed, bailouts that increased its debt load, interference in the Ukraine, and then the insanity of imposing austerity on shattered economies. There would almost be a case for saying here that, yes indeed, the EU has been a force for peace…because everyone’s now bankrupt, and thus can’t buy any more weapons: this is literally true of Greece, whose €150bn corrupt purchase of German military hardware started the fiscal rot there twelve years ago.
For me, it is the hypocrisy, bullying, amateur-night and anti-libertarian nature of Brussels that we need to get away from….that and its obvious connection to globalised trade deals and central bank monetary controls. But for most Brits – and increasingly, the newer member States in central and eastern Europe – The Big Issue is migration.
Veterans here will know my mantra about legislatures, bureaucracies, monetary theory and globalism – that is, the disconnect between all of it and the citizenry is a failure to grasp the nature and importance of social anthropology. I spent a formative seven years towards the end of the 1970s living in Brixton – a period that included two riots – and it gave me cause to think long and hard about a number of ‘unsayable’ things. What made things work in our street was the easy balance between roughly 40% white liberals and 60% West Indians: nobody felt threatened, and most of the Caribbean community there wanted the muggings and vice to be obliterated as much if not more than the whites.
But above all, the experiences of those years taught me that race is and always was a red herring: the main problem was a tricky clash of cultures. These differences surrounded two key issues: the young Afro-Caribbean’s attitude to noise nuisance, and the nature of the familial structures. These in turn varied by social class, and original island origin – so to generalise, the more middle class evangelist Barbadian slotted more easily into Anglo-Saxon culture than the average Jamaican from a rural background…as a rule.
A minority of young males had spent childhood, for example, dealing with either absentee or multiple ‘fathers’. Their attitude tended to be resentful of authority, and it was not uncommon for them to be thrown out by a ‘later’ father. The only thing that beckoned then was a life on the streets, mugging, petty crime and drugs. Some ended up in ‘Yardie’ and other gangs, where the Alpha male leader became the perfect father replacement. Drugs and firearms became a way if life, society in general The Enemy, and deep-bass loud music a source of not just cultural enjoyment, but also a vehement expression of “to Hell with the rest of you”.
It is when one culture starts to push out the host that things turn unpleasant….or when poorly integrated immigrants wind up on the scrapheap of dependency, herded together into ‘problem’ estates. For at that point, white racists and immigrant extremists can begin their painstaking and poisonous work of creating, effectively, a State Within a State: those who create two implacably opposed sides….but two sides, ironically, with a shared hatred of liberal multiculturalism.
This ocean of evidence about the dangers of multiculuralism bounces off the pc head in the manner of a featherlite pingpong ball. For three decades, they ignored public opinion about mass immigration, and engaged in a much-resented orgy of both positive discrimination on ethnic grounds, and appeasement of ideologico-religious attitudes utterly at variance with British tolerance and democracy.
It’s not as if the wholly negative historical track record was absent: in Ireland, Nigeria, India, former Soviet satellites and the Middle East, it became clear that rule by one religious sect over large minorities (even majorities) of others failed wherever it was tried. In the aftermath of ignorant optimism about “the Arab Spring”, this experience has now spread via Libya and Iraq to Syria. And in that last country – with the connivance of Turkey – presents us today with the challenge of mass migration….the numbers involved being far less important than the cultural mismatch involved.
Perhaps inevitably, the challenge is faced by the biggest and most misguided multicultural experiment ever attempted, the European Union. But attempting only the realistic goals of free trade wasn’t quite enough: 28 different cultures allowing free trade turned into the Utopian fairytale of federalism – and then to finally set the seal on dystopia, the euro hove into view. As Hollande and Muscovici predicted in a major pamphlet nearly twenty years ago (although they keep very quiet about it today) the huge cultural and commercial mismatch between northern and southern Europe led to a permanent imbalance, and then dictatorial attempts by Nordeuropa to make the South “more like us”.
Geopolitical factors only forming in the background during the EMU years have come to the fore, thanks to the controlling energy/fiscal colonialism of the US State Department – which, with Wall Street, is more or less the sovereign power there these days – and its collision with first fundamentalist, and then murderous Jihadi, Islam. Brussels-am-Berlin thus has a dual rebellion to add to its self-inflicted economic woes in 2016: the unwillingness of poorer countries to have non-EU resident border relaxation imposed upon them; and in central and eastern Europe, a categoric refusal to take on board an antithetical culture which holds only bad memories of the past (and an unwanted future) for them. Namely, Ottoman infiltration alongside US-led neoliberal colonialism.
With the notable exception of Albania – of which, more tomorrow – every ‘newer’ EU recruit from Poland to Slovakia is at best retreating from the federalist/globalist cause, or at worst in open opposition to both taking the euro and ceding control of its borders. And if all that sounds familiar to you, then that’s because these are precisely the issues driving the Vote Leave movement in the UK. Predictably, the EC Troika’s reaction has been to press ahead, give the Turks untrammelled access to EU travel, and pay off the Islamic fascist Erdogan with €3bn.
Leading the charge in central Europe is Hungary, as personified by its bluntly rebellious leader Viktor Orban. Orban’s view is very simple: “We’ve seen the caliphate at work before, and once was more than enough. Equally, we know what the US colonialists are at…and having gotten rid of first the USSR, and then its former apparatchiks, we’ve no desire to replace one set of masters with another”.
A good measure of the threat represented by Orban is that facts about him have been (along with his words) twisted and taken out of context, and he himself smeared as a neo-Nazi racist bordering on ethnic-cleansing nutter. As usual, much of this has been bankrolled by the predictable presence of George Soros, and directed by CIA black op destabilisation stunts. And equally predictably, the main people taken in by it are the European soft Left who lap up anything suggesting that The Smeared One might be off-message. (They’re the same naifs who still cling, in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence, to the belief that Russia shot down the MH17). There is much talk of Orban closing ‘opposition’ media, but no mention of the fact that all of these were controlled by dubious colonial monies and/or former Soviet lackeys. There are baseless accusations of ballot-stuffing, despite both elections he won being overseen by human rights observers.
In short, the demonisation of Viktor Orban has been undertaken for the oldest reason in recorded history: because he speaks truth to power.
This is what Tsipras and Varoufakis tried to do. The former was crushed and the latter pushed out of office….standard practice with the Brusssels Bovver Boyz.
But don’t take my word for it. Thanks to Hungarian friends, I have been able to obtain a good-quality translation of Orban’s recent State of the Nation address. You can read the full thing here, but here’s some extended extracts anyway:
“….it should suffice to say that within three years we consolidated the budget, stabilised the economy, avoided bankruptcy, curbed inflation and reduced unemployment – the latter not marginally, but from 11.5% to 6.2%. We sent the IMF packing, repaid our loan ahead of schedule, and this year we shall also repay the last blessed penny of our debt to the European Union. All in all, in 2014 we rounded off this period of stabilisation with economic growth of 3.7%, and opened a new chapter…..In five years we have reduced personal income tax from 35% to 15%, and in five years we have left 1,300 billion forints in the pockets of families. We have reduced household utility bills by 25%, and in five years the minimum wage in Hungary has increased by 50%. We have achieved this together: the state and the market; the Government and the business sector; employers and employees; Hungarian micro-, small and medium-sized enterprises and the local subsidiaries of global conglomerates. We have achieved this together, and together we can be proud of this achievement….”
“….we can only be independent if all three [Great Powers] at once have an interest in the independence and economic growth of Hungary…..It is therefore the iron law of Hungarian foreign policy that we Hungarians have an interest in peace. It may be sarcastic and ironic, but it is true: our place is in the camp of peace. The same logic tells us that we should not allow ourselves to be drawn into any international campaign against Germans, Russians or Turks. It does not serve Hungary’s interests to join international campaigns which abuse, insult or injure the national self-esteem of one country or another…”
“…..our national culture – which is slowly finding its feet once again – is also in danger….The name of this danger is mass migration….One year ago, on this same occasion, we were already warning that a new age of mass migration had begun. We were mocked mercilessly, and insulted by friends, allies and rivals alike. The thing is, however, that the new mass migration is now a historical fact. No one in their right mind disputes this any longer…..this seems like a dream world to us – one in which ideologies, desires and real life are all mixed up. A well-heeled, safe and pleasant world in which clarity evaporates, and boundaries disappear. A world in which there is a blurring of the boundaries between nation and nation, culture and culture, man and woman, good and bad, holy and profane, freedom and responsibility, good intentions and actions. A world in which there is a blurring of the boundary between what is and what should be. It is as if the sense of reality has been damaged or deadened. In contrast, our sense of reality is as sharp and cold as common sense, or March winds. We have learnt that reality is that which does not disappear – even if we no longer believe in it. This is why we always measure everything against reality, and why we do not confuse reality with our desires.”
This last extract is about as close as one could get to my own life philosophy, and why I have for five years now described The Slog as ‘radical realism’: the triumph of fancy over fact always ends badly.
It also sums up very well indeed why I reject all ideology, sticking only with the utilitarian philosophy of Bentham…as I choose to interpret his core goal, “The greatest fulfilment of the greatest number”.
Viktor Orban talks more sense in one paragraph than the entire Brussels-am-Berlin dystopians have managed during a decade of controlling, cloud-based, mendacious tosh. We should be giving the lead to others with less power than ourselves by giving them hope – not collaborating with their enemies. We should get off the pot, Vote Leave, and consign this sorry period of our history to the dustbin.
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